Amazon fulfills its end of the deal with Texas

Nine months after it struck a deal with the state to bring thousands of jobs and invest millions of dollars in Texas, online retail giant Amazon.com on Wednesday unveiled the first steps toward keeping its end of the bargain.

Amazon said Wednesday it will build three fulfillment centers in Texas, creating about 1,000 jobs. The new facilities will include a 1.2 million square-foot site in Schertz, east of San Antonio; and two sites in the Dallas-Fort Worth area — a 1 million-square-foot center in Coppell and a 1.1 million-square-foot facility in Haslet.

The fulfillment centers in Schertz and Coppell will handle the shipment of “larger items—anything from televisions to bbqs, for example,” Amazon said. The Haslet center will ship smaller items like books, small electronics or DVDs, the company said.

“We look forward to putting more than 1,000 Texans to work at our new fulfillment centers in Schertz, Coppell and Haslet,” Mike Roth, Amazon’s vice president of North American fulfillment, said in a news release. “We appreciate the state and local elected officials who have helped us make this exciting investment in the state of Texas.”

In April of last year, Amazon struck a deal with Texas Comptroller Susan Combs, calling for the online retailer to bring 2,500 jobs and $200 million in capital investment to the state, and to start collecting tax on sales made to people in Texas. Amazon began collecting the sales tax on July 1.

See here, here, and here for the background. Amazon had announced the Schertz location in November. Barring anything unusual this ought to be the end of the story in Texas, but it remains the case that Amazon and other online retailers should be paying sales taxes on Internet transactions regardless of what deals have been worked out in what states. It also remains the case that the current Congress is never going to fix that, so this is the workaround for now.